The US Department of Justice has finally posted what Judge Amit Mehta described at the Google search antitrust trial as an “embarrassing” exhibit that Google tried to hide from the public.
The document in question contains meeting notes that Google’s vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, “created for a course on communications,” Bloomberg reported. In his notes, Roszak wrote that Google’s search advertising “is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created” with economics that only certain “illicit businesses” selling “cigarettes or drugs” “could rival.”
At trial, Roszak told the court that he didn’t recall if he ever gave the presentation. He said that the course required that he tell students “things I don’t believe as part of the presentation.” He also claimed that the notes were “full of hyperbole and exaggeration” and did not reflect his true beliefs, “because there was no business purpose associated with it.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The document in question contains meeting notes that Google’s vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, “created for a course on communications,” Bloomberg reported.
Sealing Roszak’s testimony made it harder for the public to understand the context of the document, Mehta worried.
Part of the DOJ’s case argues that because Google has a monopoly over search, it’s less incentivized to innovate products that protect consumers from harm like invasive data collection.
A Google spokesman told Bloomberg that Roszak’s statements “don’t reflect the company’s opinion” and “were drafted for a public speaking class in which the instructions were to say something hyperbolic and attention-grabbing.”
According to Bloomberg, Google lawyer Edward Bennett told the court that Roszak’s notes suggest that the senior executive’s plan for his presentation was essentially “cosplaying Gordon Gekko”—a movie villain who symbolizes corporate greed from 1987’s Wall Street.
The debate over how much of Roszak’s notes could be shared with the public ended with an agreement between the DOJ and Google on all trial exhibits.
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