The DOJ alleged in its 2024 filing that Adobe’s handling of subscriptions violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, which was passed in 2010 to prevent deceptive charges in online services. With the newly announced settlement, Adobe will be able to wrap up the case for a relative pittance.
Adobe maintains innocence
The case could have been messy for Adobe if it had gone to court, but now that won’t happen. Under the terms of the settlement, Adobe has agreed to pay the government $75 million, but it doesn’t admit to violating the law.
“While we disagree with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” Adobe said in a statement.
In addition to giving the government its pound of flesh, Adobe says it will provide $75 million in free services to affected customers. It is unclear from the statement which customers qualify or what they’ll get. We’ve asked Adobe for specifics, but it’s a safe bet that anyone who paid a cancellation fee is included. Adobe says it will reach out to these customers with details once it has made the necessary court filings to wrap up the case.
Don’t expect this outcome to change how Adobe does business today. The company claims it has rolled out changes to its sales pipeline in recent years to make the cancellation fees clearer at the time of purchase. And it’s undoubtedly going to continue focusing on subscriptions. Revenues have been growing steadily ever since it switched to Creative Cloud, and it made more than $7 billion in net profit last year. Writing a $75 million check to make this case go away is a big win for Adobe.
Court to search devices itself instead of letting government have full access.
The Washington Post building on August 6, 2013 in Washington, DC, Credit: Getty Images | Saul Loeb
A federal court will conduct a search of devices seized from a Washington Post reporter after a magistrate judge decided yesterday that the Department of Justice cannot be trusted to perform the search on its own.
US Magistrate Judge William Porter criticized government prosecutors for not including key information in a search warrant application. The court wasn’t aware of a 1980 law that limits searches and seizures of journalists’ work materials when it approved the warrant, Porter acknowledged.
The decision came six weeks after the FBI executed the search warrant at the Virginia home of reporter Hannah Natanson. Porter declined the Post and Natanson’s request to return the devices immediately but decided on a court-led process to ensure that the search is limited to materials that may aid a criminal case against an alleged leaker who was in contact with Natanson. He also rescinded the portion of the search warrant that authorized the government to open, access, review, or otherwise examine the seized data.
“The government acknowledges that it established probable cause to obtain only a small fraction of the material it seized,” Porter wrote in yesterday’s order. “Allowing the government to search through the entirety of a reporter’s work product—when probable cause exists for only a narrow subset—would authorize an unlawful general warrant.”
Porter’s ruling said the government’s proposed search would also violate the Department of Justice’s own guidelines that search warrants directed at the press must be narrowly drawn and that searches of materials must be designed to minimize intrusion into newsgathering activities and materials that are unrelated to the investigation. Keyword searches can be used to limit the intrusion, but Porter rejected the government’s request to use its own “filter team” to conduct the search.
“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product—most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources—is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” Porter wrote.
Rejecting what he called an “unsupervised, wholesale search of all Movants’ seized data,” Porter said the court will develop a process for the search in consultation with the parties involved in the case.
US prosecuting alleged leaker
The US is seeking information for its prosecution of Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor accused of leaking classified information to Natanson. Porter wrote that the court will conduct the search to “gather the information the government needs to prosecute its criminal case without authorizing an unrestrained search and violating Movants’ First Amendment and attorney-client privileges.”
Porter, who presides in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, said that a 4th Circuit appeals court precedent mandates this result. The US could appeal Porter’s ruling to that court.
On January 21, Porter ordered the government to stop its search of Natanson’s devices until further decisions from the court. That standstill order will remain in effect while the court conducts its review of the seized materials. Porter denied the Post and Natanson’s motion to return seized materials without prejudice and said that issue will be taken up in future proceedings.
The government started searching devices before the standstill order and was able to access Natanson’s work MacBook Pro by compelling her to unlock it with her fingerprint. But the government said it was unable to access data from the iPhone because it was protected by Apple’s Lockdown Mode. Natanson has said she uses encrypted Signal chats to communicate with sources and that her list of contacts exceeds 1,100 current and former government employees.
Porter’s ruling recounted the events leading to the government search of Natanson’s home. He said the government’s search warrant application should have discussed limitations imposed by the Privacy Protection Act (PPA) of 1980.
Porter said magistrate judges give the government some leeway in their role “as probable cause gatekeepers for search warrants,” given the “fast-paced environment” in which the requests are processed. The Natanson search warrant was one of 46 requested by the government that week.
Court admits “gap” in its analysis
Porter admitted that he was unaware of the PPA’s existence at the time he approved the warrant application:
As the judge who found probable cause and approved the search warrant, the Court acknowledges that it did not independently identify the PPA when reviewing the warrant application. As far as this Court knows, courts have approved search warrants directed at members of the press in only a handful of instances. This Court had never received such an application and, at the time it approved the warrant, was unaware of the PPA. This Court’s review was limited to probable cause, and the Court accepts that gap in its own analysis.
Porter went on to say that “the government’s failure to identify the PPA as applicable to a request for a search warrant on a member of the press—and to analyze it in its warrant application… has seriously undermined the Court’s confidence in the government’s disclosures in this proceeding.”
The PPA, he wrote, generally prohibits government officers “from searching for or seizing ‘work product materials’ or ‘documentary materials’ possessed by a person ‘reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication.’” There are exceptions allowing search warrants when a reporter is suspected of a crime, when a seizure is needed to prevent death or serious injury, or when there is reason to believe that issuing a subpoena would result in the destruction of documents.
A Washington Post article said that Porter “scolded prosecutors about this omission at a hearing on the search warrant in an Alexandria courthouse Friday.” Prosecutor Gordon Kromberg reportedly responded that he didn’t mention the law in the application because he didn’t believe it applied to the case.
Porter’s ruling said that if the government had mentioned the law in its application, “the Court may well have rejected the search warrant application and directed the government to proceed by subpoena instead. At the very least, it would have asked more questions. The government deprived the Court of the opportunity to make those real-time decisions.”
Judge should have gone further, press group says
Even without being aware of the PPA, the court did not approve the Natanson warrant right away. Porter’s order said the court rejected the government’s first two requests for a search warrant because they were too broad. The court was “concerned about both the scope of the proposed search warrant and the government’s apparent attempt to collect information about Ms. Natanson’s confidential sources,” he wrote.
The search warrant ultimately approved by the court was limited to information that Natanson received from Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones and information related to Perez-Lugones that could be evidence in the case against him.
“The government expressly alleged that Ms. Natanson received classified information from Mr. Perez-Lugones,” but its search warrant application did not say whether Natanson herself was a target of the criminal investigation, Porter wrote. “The Court learned that Ms. Natanson was not a focus of the investigation only through press reports published the day the warrant was executed,” he wrote.
Porter said the court has to take seriously the government’s claim that the case “involves top secret national security information,” even though the court doesn’t know whether disclosure of the information would cause harm. “The Court takes the government at its word, while acknowledging the well-documented concern that the government has at times overclassified information to avoid embarrassing disclosures rather than to protect genuine secrets,” he wrote.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation said that “Judge Porter was right to treat the seizure as a prior restraint and to limit the government from fishing through the irrelevant data it seized to snoop on reporters,” and right to reprimand prosecutors for the omission in their search warrant application. But the order didn’t go far enough, the foundation said.
“Judge Porter should have required all of Natanson’s materials seized pursuant to the deceptive warrant application to be returned to her,” the group said. “And he should not have credited the administration’s claims that any of the seized materials posed a national security threat without strict proof—as Judge Porter acknowledged, this administration, even more so than others, has a long track record of falsely claiming national security threats to protect itself from embarrassment and further its political agenda. It has earned zero deference from the judiciary on claims of national security threats, particularly when press freedom is at stake.”
Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.
DOJ reportedly failed to redact nearly 40 nude photos and 43 victims’ names.
Epstein survivor Haley Robson holds up a photo of her younger self during a news conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on November 18, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Daniel Heuer/AFP
The Epstein files released by the Department of Justice on Friday included at least a few dozen unredacted nude photos and names of at least 43 victims, according to news reports.
The DOJ missed a December 19 deadline set by the Epstein Files Transparency Act by more than a month, but still released the files without fully redacting nude photos and names of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. The New York Times reported yesterday that it found “nearly 40 unredacted images that appeared to be part of a personal photo collection, showing both nude bodies and the faces of the people portrayed.”
While the people in the photos were young, “it was unclear whether they were minors,” the article said. “Some of the images seemed to show Mr. Epstein’s private island, including a beach. Others were taken in bedrooms and other private spaces.” The photos “appeared to show at least seven different people,” the article said.
The Times said it notified government officials of the nude images and that the pictures have since been “largely removed or redacted” from the files available on the DOJ website. The DOJ told the Times and other media outlets that it is making “additional redactions of personally identifiable information” and redactions of “images of a sexual nature. Once proper redactions have been made, any responsive documents will repopulate online.”
A DOJ spokesperson told Ars today that the department “takes victim protection very seriously and has redacted thousands of victims’ names in the millions of published pages to protect the innocent. The Department had 500 reviewers looking at millions of pages for this very reason, to meet the requirements of the act while protecting victims. When a victim’s name is alleged to be unredacted, our team is working around the clock to fix the issue and republish appropriately redacted pages as soon as possible. To date, 0.1 percent of released pages have been found to have victim identifying information unredacted.”
The 0.1 percent figure is apparently an increase since yesterday, presumably because of more reports of incomplete redactions in the past day. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told ABC News yesterday that “every time we hear from a victim or their lawyer that they believe that their name was not properly redacted, we immediately rectify that. And the numbers we’re talking about, just so the American people understand, we’re talking about .001 percent of all the materials.”
Images “stayed online for at least another full day”
404 Media reported that it sent the DOJ links to nude images from the DOJ’s website and that the “files stayed online for at least another full day, until Sunday evening, when they disappeared.”
Separately, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the files included full names of victims, “including many who haven’t shared their identities publicly or were minors when they were abused by the notorious sex offender. A review of 47 victims’ full names on Sunday found that 43 of them were left unredacted in files that were made public by the government on Friday… Several women’s full names appeared more than 100 times in the files.”
The Journal said its review found that over two dozen names of minor victims were exposed. “Their full names were available Sunday afternoon in the Justice Department’s keyword search, along with personally identifying details that make them readily traceable, including home addresses,” the article said.
Anouska de Georgiou, an Epstein victim who testified against Ghislaine Maxwell, “said she contacted the Justice Department this weekend after learning that her personal information was made public in the release, including a picture of her driver’s license,” the Journal wrote.
DOJ said it made “all reasonable efforts”
Brad Edwards, an attorney for Epstein victims, told ABC News that “we are getting constant calls for victims because their names, despite them never coming forward, being completely unknown to the public, have all just been released for public consumption… It’s literally thousands of mistakes.” Edwards said the government should “take the thing down for now” instead of trying to fix the problems piecemeal.
The DOJ said Friday that the release includes more than 3 million pages, including over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The agency said it used “an additional review protocol” to comply with a court order requiring that no victim-identifying information be included unredacted in the public release.
“These files were collected from five primary sources including the Florida and New York cases against Epstein, the New York case against Maxwell, the New York cases investigating Epstein’s death, the Florida case investigating a former butler of Epstein, multiple FBI investigations, and the Office of Inspector General investigation into Epstein’s death,” the DOJ said.
The DOJ’s Epstein files webpage carries a disclaimer on the potential release of images or names that should have been redacted. “In view of the Congressional deadline, all reasonable efforts have been made to review and redact personal information pertaining to victims, other private individuals, and protect sensitive materials from disclosure. That said, because of the volume of information involved, this website may nevertheless contain information that inadvertently includes non-public personally identifiable information or other sensitive content, to include matters of a sexual nature,” it says.
The DOJ’s Epstein webpage advised that members of the public can email [email protected] to report materials that should not have been included.
Lawyer: DOJ put onus on victims to review files
Annie Farmer, who testified that she was 16 years old when Epstein and Maxwell abused her in 1996, told the Times that “it’s hard to imagine a more egregious way of not protecting victims than having full nude images of them available for the world to download.” Farmer is now a psychologist.
The DOJ told ABC News in a statement that it “coordinated closely with victims and their lawyers to ensure that the production of documents includes necessary redactions,” and wants to “immediately correct any redaction errors that our team may have made.”
Edwards and Brittany Henderson, who are partners at the same law firm, “said they provided a list of 350 victims to the Justice Department on Dec. 4 to ensure that the names would be redacted ahead of the release,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “They said Sunday that they are alarmed that the government didn’t perform a basic keyword search of victim names to verify the success of its redaction process.”
Edwards said he contacted Justice Department officials on Friday. “We notified them of the problem within an hour of the release,” Edwards was quoted as saying. “It’s been acknowledged as a grave error; there is no excuse for failing to immediately remedy it unless it was done intentionally.”
Edwards said the DOJ is putting the onus on victims to comb through millions of files and submit redaction requests. “In some cases, he said individuals have had to locate and submit more than 100 links to the DOJ to request that their names be redacted,” the Journal wrote.
Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.
The court ruled that Google has a search monopoly. Now, we learn the consequences.
The remedy phase of Google’s search antitrust trial is getting underway, and the government is seeking to force major changes. The next few weeks could reshape Google as a company and significantly alter the balance of power on the Internet, and both sides have a plan to get their way.
With opening arguments beginning today, the US Justice Department will seek to convince the court that Google should be forced to divest Chrome, unbundle Android, and make other foundational changes. But Google will attempt to paint the government’s position as too extreme and rooted in past grievances. No matter what happens at this trial, Google hasn’t given up hope it can turn back time.
Advantage for Justice Dept.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has a major advantage here: Google is guilty. It lost the liability phase of this trial resoundingly, with the court finding Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power.” As far as the court is concerned, Google has an illegal monopoly in search services and general search advertising. The purpose of this trial is to determine what to do about it, and the DOJ has some ideas.
This case, overseen by United States District Judge Amit Mehta, is taking place against a backdrop that is particularly unflattering for Google. It has been rocked by loss after loss in its antitrust cases, including the Epic-backed Google Play case, plus the search case that is at issue here. And just last week, a court ruled that Google abused its monopoly in advertising tech. The remedies in Google’s app store case are currently on hold pending appeal, but that problem is not going away. Meanwhile, Google is facing even more serious threats in the remedy phase of this trial.
The DOJ will come out guns blazing—it sees this as the most consequential antitrust case in the US since the Microsoft trial of the 1990s. The effects of breaking up Google could even rival the impact of antitrust actions against AT&T and Standard Oil decades earlier. We also expect to be reminded repeatedly that virtually every state has joined the government’s case against Google, indicating wide understanding that the market is not operating fairly.
It’s no secret that incentives at the federal level are shifting as the second Trump administration politicizes the Justice Department to an unprecedented degree. Despite the new divisions, opinions are remarkably unified on the Google search case. The DOJ team has successfully made the case that Google is a monopolist, and now they have to enforce the law. The new conservative leadership sees Google as a principal source of the “censorship” of right-wing ideology, which they largely interpret as a downstream effect of Google’s undue market power.
This phase of the case is not about whether or not Google did it; the goal is to decide how to change Google. The DOJ tells Ars that it believes Google’s proposed remedies are anemic and won’t move the needle at all. In this case, government lawyers will argue that the playing field cannot be leveled unless Google gives something up, and that something ought to be Chrome. The government will attempt to show that Google’s handling of Chrome creates a barrier to competition, preferencing Google’s services over the competition.
The DOJ has suggested there are numerous entities that could acquire Chrome and instantly realign online markets, but Google is going to push back hard on that. The government will counter by producing multiple witnesses from Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft, and others to explain how their search businesses were stymied by Google and how hacking off Chrome could rectify that.
The DOJ is also interested in Google’s search placement deals—for example, paying Apple and Mozilla billions of dollars to make Google their default search engine. In the government’s view, this forced rivals to nibble around the edges after being locked out by Google’s contracts. The DOJ will try to have these contracts banned in addition to forcing the sale of Chrome.
Not done fighting
Google has already announced its preferred remedies in this case, which amount to less exclusivity in search contracts and more freedom for Android OEMs to choose app preloads. Google says it would also accept additional government oversight to ensure it abides by these remedies.
In the remedy phase, Google will try to portray the Justice Department’s proposal as heavy-handed and emblematic of the agency’s “interventionist agenda.” We expect to see Google looking for any opportunity to make the DOJ look out of touch with the realities of technology today.
Google says it will spend a lot of time arguing against the DOJ’s attempt to end search placement deals, and it will have some backup here in the form of representatives from Mozilla and Apple, both of which are paid billions of dollars per year to make Google their default search engine. These firms will explain Google’s services are the best available, and that’s why they use them. In the case of Mozilla, almost all the foundation’s revenue comes from Google, and Google doesn’t dispute that. In fact, it has noted in the past (and surely will again at the trial) that Mozilla would fold without all that Google money, and that’s bad for user choice. However, the DOJ will probably point out that the massive revenue Apple and Mozilla get from these deals makes their testimony less reliable.
Another pillar of Google’s opposition will be the privacy and security implications of the DOJ’s demand for data sharing. The DOJ will claim this is essential to help other search providers to compete, but Google will paint this as a threat to the privacy of user data. And then there’s the national security angle, which Google has been pushing harder since the start of the year.
More than anything else, Google doesn’t want to lose Chrome. We expect to see Google’s established opposition to Chrome divestiture cranked up to 11 in the remedy phase. The company will no doubt be able to point to many instances where it acted as a benevolent steward of the open web through the dominance of Chrome. It chose to make Chromium open source and has kept it that way, even though it could have made more money keeping the code to itself.
Credit: Getty Images
There is uncertainty about the future of Chrome if it’s sold off, and a Google spokesperson suggests the company will capitalize on that. Google’s legal team will forecast a world in which Chrome has become less secure without Google’s involvement, the Chromium project has crumbled, and browser choice has cratered. Google says its goal of providing easy access to its products and services gives it a strong incentive to keep Chrome free and open, which may not be the case for its new owner. The DOJ would call that self-dealing, of course.
While the government has backed away from the stringent AI investment limits in its original remedy request, Google still worries its AI efforts could be hampered by limits on self-dealing. We expect Google to talk about the rapid pace of changes in AI today, portraying this case as too focused on how the search market worked a decade ago. The company may even go so far as to admit it’s losing ground to the likes of OpenAI as more people use AI to get answers to their questions instead of traditional web search. But can a company worth $2 trillion count on anyone feeling sorry for it?
A time of consequence
The trial will run for a few weeks, and later on, we’ll learn what remedies the court has decided to impose. That doesn’t mean anything will change for Google in the short- or medium-term, though. All the lawyering should be done by early May, and then it’s up to Judge Mehta to decide on the final remedies, which could come as late as August 2025.
That won’t be the end of things. Google is adamant that it plans to appeal the case, but it has to go through the remedy phase first. Google may be able to get the remedies paused while it pursues a new verdict, similar to the current state of the app store case. Much of what the DOJ wants would fundamentally alter the nature of Google’s business, making it difficult to undo the changes if Google does prevail on appeal.
Even if Google can maintain the status quo for the foreseeable future, the company could be headed into Google I/O in late May with a sword of Damocles dangling over its metaphorical head. Google has enjoyed years of growth so stupendous and unprecedented that it reshaped media and commerce. If Google is forced to give up a key product like Chrome or lose its default status in popular products, there’s no telling how the Internet could change. One thing is certain, though. The next few weeks will be the most consequential for Google since it went public more than 20 years ago.
Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.
Elez reports to Tom Krause, another Treasury Department special government employee, but Krause doesn’t have direct access to the payment system, Humphreys told the judge. Krause is the CEO of Cloud Software Group and is also viewed as a Musk ally.
But when the judge pressed Humphreys on Musk’s alleged access, the DOJ lawyer only said that as far as the defense team was aware, Musk did not have access.
Further, Humphreys explained that DOGE—which functions as part of the executive office—does not have access, to the DOJ’s knowledge. As he explained it, DOGE sets the high-level priorities that these special government employees carry out, seemingly trusting the employees to identify waste and protect taxpayer dollars without ever providing any detailed reporting on the records that supposedly are evidence of mismanagement.
To Kollar-Kotelly, the facts on the record seem to suggest that no one outside the Treasury is currently accessing sensitive data. But when she pressed Humphreys on whether DOGE had future plans to access the data, Humphreys declined to comment, calling it irrelevant to the complaint.
Humphreys suggested that the government’s defense in this case would focus on the complaint that outsiders are currently accessing Treasury data, seemingly dismissing any need to discuss DOGE’s future plans. But the judge pushed back, telling Humphreys she was not trying to “nail” him “to the wall,” but there’s too little information on the relationship between DOGE and the Treasury Department as it stands. How these entities work together makes a difference, the judge suggested, in terms of safeguarding sensitive Treasury data.
According to Kollar-Kotelly, granting a temporary restraining order in part would allow DOGE to “preserve the status quo” of its current work in the Treasury Department while ensuring no new outsiders get access to Americans’ sensitive information. Such an order would give both sides time to better understand the current government workflows to best argue their cases, the judge suggested.
If the order is approved, it would remain in effect until the judge rules on plantiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction. At the hearing today, Kollar-Kotelly suggested that matter would likely be settled at a hearing on February 24.
At the end of 2024, a US court authorized the Department of Justice to sell 69,370 bitcoins from “the largest cryptocurrency seizure in history.”
At bitcoin’s current price, just under $92,000, these bitcoins are worth nearly $6.4 billion, and crypto outlets are reporting that DOJ officials have said they’re planning to proceed with selling off the assets consistent with the court’s order. The DOJ had reportedly argued that bitcoin’s price volatility was a pressing reason to push for permission for the sale.
Ars has reached out to the DOJ for comment and will update the story with any new information regarding next steps.
A hacker initially stole these bitcoins from Silk Road—an illegal online marketplace where goods could only be bought and sold with bitcoins—in 2012, shortly before the US government shut down the marketplace. The US later discovered the stolen bitcoins in 2020 while conducting further investigations of Silk Road, eventually securing a consent agreement that year from the hacker, who signed the bitcoins over to the government.
Whether the government’s seizure of those bitcoins was proper has been disputed by Battle Born Investments, a company that purchased the assets of bankruptcy estate from an individual who they believed to be either the hacker whose bitcoins were seized or someone “associated with him.”
After a court battle failed to return the bitcoins, Battle Born attempted to unmask the hacker through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which sparked a new court fight. But ultimately, in late December, the court agreed with the US government that the hacker had a right to privacy as someone who was the subject of a criminal investigation and shouldn’t be unmasked. That ended Battle Born’s claim to the bitcoins and cleared the way for the government’s sale.
The Justice Department says that landlords did more than use RealPage in the alleged pricing scheme. “Along with using RealPage’s anticompetitive pricing algorithms, these landlords coordinated through a variety of means,” such as “directly communicating with competitors’ senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics,” the DOJ said.
There were “call arounds” in which “property managers called or emailed competitors to share, and sometimes discuss, competitively sensitive information about rents, occupancy, pricing strategies and discounts,” the DOJ said.
Landlords discussed their use of RealPage software with each other, the DOJ said. “For instance, landlords discussed via user groups how to modify the software’s pricing methodology, as well as their own pricing strategies,” the DOJ said. “In one example, LivCor and Willow Bridge executives participated in a user group discussion of plans for renewal increases, concessions and acceptance rates of RealPage rent recommendations.”
DOJ: Firms discussed “auto-accept” settings
The DOJ lawsuit says RealPage pushes clients to use “auto-accept settings” that automatically approve pricing recommendations. The DOJ said today that property rental firms discussed how they use those settings.
“As an example, at the request of Willow Bridge’s director of revenue management, Greystar’s director of revenue management supplied its standard auto-accept parameters for RealPage’s software, including the daily and weekly limits and the days of the week for which Greystar used ‘auto-accept,'” the DOJ said.
Greystar issued a statement saying it is “disappointed that the DOJ added us and other operators to their lawsuit against RealPage,” and that it will “vigorously” defend itself in court. “Greystar has and will conduct its business with the utmost integrity. At no time did Greystar engage in any anti-competitive practices,” the company said.
The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
A bitcoin investor who went to increasingly great lengths to hide $1 million in cryptocurrency gains on his tax returns was sentenced to two years in prison on Thursday.
It seems that not even his most “sophisticated” tactics—including using mixers, managing multiple wallets, and setting up in-person meetings to swap bitcoins for cash—kept the feds from tracing crypto trades that he believed were untraceable.
The Austin, Texas, man, Frank Richard Ahlgren III, started buying up bitcoins in 2011. In 2015, he upped his trading, purchasing approximately 1,366 using Coinbase accounts. He waited until 2017 before cashing in, earning $3.7 million after selling about 640 at a price more than 10 times his initial costs. Celebrating his gains, he bought a house in Utah in 2017, mostly funded by bitcoins he purchased in 2015.
Very quickly, Ahlgren sought to hide these earnings, the Department of Justice said in a press release. Rather than report them on his 2017 tax return, Ahlgren “lied to his accountant by submitting a false summary of his gains and losses from the sale of his bitcoins.” He did this by claiming that the bitcoins he purchased in 2015 were much higher than his actual costs, even being so bold as to claim he as charged prices “greater than the highest price bitcoins sold for in the market prior to the purchase of the Utah house.”
First tax evasion prosecution centered solely on crypto
Ahlgren’s tax evasion only got bolder as the years passed after this first fraud, the DOJ said.
In 2018 and 2019, he sold more bitcoins, earning more than $650,000 and deciding not to report any of it on his tax returns for those years. That meant that he needed to actively conceal the earnings, but he’d been apparently researching how mixers are used to disguise where bitcoins come from since at least 2014, the feds found, referencing a blog he wrote exhibiting his knowledge. And that’s not the only step he took to try to trick the Internal Revenue Service.
After US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has a monopoly in two markets—general search services and general text advertising—everybody is wondering how Google might be forced to change its search business.
Specifically, the judge ruled that Google’s exclusive deals with browser and device developers secured Google’s monopoly. These so-called default agreements funneled the majority of online searches to Google search engine result pages (SERPs), where results could be found among text ads that have long generated the bulk of Google’s revenue.
At trial, Mehta’s ruling noted, it was estimated that if Google lost its most important default deal with Apple, Google “would lose around 65 percent of its revenue, even assuming that it could retain some users without the Safari default.”
Experts told Ars that disrupting these default deals is the most obvious remedy that the US Department of Justice will seek to restore competition in online search. Other remedies that may be sought range from least painful for Google (mandating choice screens in browsers and devices) to most painful (requiring Google to divest from either Chrome or Android, where it was found to be self-preferencing).
But the remedies phase of litigation may have to wait until after Google’s appeal, which experts said could take years to litigate before any remedies are ever proposed in court. Whether Google could be successful in appealing the ruling is currently being debated, with anti-monopoly advocates backing Mehta’s ruling as “rock solid” and critics suggesting that the ruling’s fresh takes on antitrust law are open to attack.
Google declined Ars’ request to comment on appropriate remedies or its plan to appeal.
Previously, Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, confirmed in a statement that the tech giant would be appealing the ruling because the court found that “Google is ‘the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users,’ that Google ‘has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices,’ ‘has continued to innovate in search,’ and that ‘Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.'”
“Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal,” Walker said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”
But Mehta found that Google was wielding its outsize influence in the search industry to block rivals from competing by locking browsers and devices into agreements ensuring that all searches went to Google SERPs. None of the pro-competitive benefits that Google claimed justified the exclusive deals persuaded Mehta, who ruled that “importantly,” Google “exercised its monopoly power by charging supra-competitive prices for general search text ads”—and thus earned “monopoly profits.”
While experts think the appeal process will delay litigation on remedies, Google seems to think that Mehta may rule on potential remedies before Google can proceed with its appeal. Walker told Google employees that a ruling on remedies may arrive in the next few months, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ars will continue monitoring for updates on this timeline.
As the DOJ’s case against Google’s search business has dragged on, reports have long suggested that a loss for Google could change the way that nearly the entire world searches the Internet.
Adam Epstein—the president and co-CEO of adMarketplace, which bills itself as “the largest consumer search technology company outside of Google and Bing”—told Ars that innovations in search could result in a broader landscape of more dynamic search experiences that draw from sources beyond Google and allow searchers to skip Google’s SERPs entirely. If that happens, the coming years could make Google’s ubiquitous search experience today a distant memory.
“By the end of this decade, going to a search engine results page will seem quaint,” Epstein predicted. “The court’s decision sets the stage for a remedy that will dramatically improve the search experience for everyone connected to the web. The era of innovation in search is just around the corner.”
The DOJ has not meaningfully discussed potential remedies it will seek, but Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, celebrated the ruling.
“This landmark decision holds Google accountable,” Kanter said. “It paves the path for innovation for generations to come and protects access to information for all Americans.”
Google just lost a massive antitrust trial over its sprawling search business, as US district judge Amit Mehta released his ruling, showing that he sided with the US Department of Justice in the case that could disrupt how billions of people search the web.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
The verdict will likely come as a shock to Google, which had long argued that punishing Google for being the best in search would be “unprecedented” and frequently pointed to the DOJ’s lack of direct evidence. However, Mehta found the limited direct evidence compelling, especially “Google’s admission that it does not ‘consider whether users will go to other specific search providers (general or otherwise) if it introduces a change to its Search product.'”
“Google’s indifference is unsurprising,” Mehta wrote. “In 2020, Google conducted a quality degradation study, which showed that it would not lose search revenue if were to significantly reduce the quality of its search product. Just as the power to raise price ‘when it is desired to do so’ is proof of monopoly power, so too is the ability to degrade product quality without concern of losing consumers.”
He also wrote that the DOJ’s indirect evidence “easily establishes Google’s monopoly power in search” and concluded that “the fact that Google makes product changes without concern that its users might go elsewhere is something only a firm with monopoly power could do.”
Google didn’t lose every battle in this big fight with the DOJ. Mehta ruled that Google did not have monopoly power in search advertising, agreed that there was no market for general search advertising, and declined to sanction Google for allegedly destroying evidence by “failing to preserve its employees’ chat messages.”
Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, provided a statement to Ars, confirming that Google plans to appeal.
“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” Walker said. “We appreciate the Court’s finding that Google is ‘the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users,’ that Google ‘has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices,’ ‘has continued to innovate in search,’ and that ‘Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.’ Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal. As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”
Google monopolizes two markets, judge ruled
Mehta ruled that Google spending billions on exclusive distribution agreements with companies like Apple helped the tech giant maintain monopolies in two markets, general search services and general text advertising.
The US government had argued that Google used these exclusive deals to block out competitors like Bing or DuckDuckGo, “by ensuring that all of Android and Apple and mobile users are offered Google, either as the default general search engine or the only general search engine, Google’s deals with Android and Apple clearly have a significant effect in preserving its monopoly.” The DOJ successfully argued that blocks rivals from reaching the “critical level necessary” to “pose a real threat to Google’s monopoly.”
Mehta noted that Google’s dominance had “gone unchallenged for well over a decade,” partly due to a “largely unseen advantage over its rivals: default distribution.” He found that Google’s exclusive distribution deals foreclosed a “substantial share” of the markets and allowed Google to earn more revenues. Google then shared spiking revenues with device and browser developers—spending up to $26 billion in 2021 alone for exclusive deals, the trial revealed.
Google did all this, Mehta said, to ensure that “most devices in the United States come preloaded exclusively with Google” and to force “Google’s rivals to find other ways to reach users.” The DOJ successfully argued that this posed “significant barriers that protect Google’s market dominance in general search,” with rivals having to overcome “high capital costs—”to the tune of billions of dollars,” Mehta wrote—”Google’s control of key distribution channels, brand recognition, and scale.”
Barriers to entry in general text advertising are similarly “high,” Mehta said, with new entrants facing “the same major obstacles as would the developer of a new” search engine.
One of the most scrutinized exclusive deals was between Google and Apple, which was estimated at $20 billion in 2022. “This is nearly double the payment made in 2020,” Mehta noted, suggesting that Google increasingly valued the deal locking its search engine as the default in Safari as a way to shore up its search dominance.
“Google has long recognized that, if Apple were to develop and deploy its own search engine as the default” search tool “in Safari, it would come at great cost to Google,” Mehta wrote. Without the deal, Google “would lose around 65 percent of its revenue, even assuming that it could retain some users without the Safari default” placement. But “Apple has decided not to enter general search,” Mehta said, likely because it “would forego significant revenues” and potentially face user backlash if it stopped partnering with Google. Similarly high revenue loss would occur if “Google were to lose the Android defaults,” Mehta said.
None of the pro-competitive benefits that Google claimed justified the exclusive deals persuaded Mehta, who ruled that “importantly,” Google “exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads”—and thus earned “monopoly profits.”
“That Google makes changes to its text ads auctions without considering its rivals’ prices is something that only a firm with monopoly power is able to do,” Mehta wrote. And “Google in fact has profitably raised prices substantially above the competitive level. That makes ‘the existence of monopoly power” “clear.”
Ultimately, Mehta ruled that “Google has no true competitor” in general search and without any “genuine” competition, “over the last decade, Google’s grip on the market has only grown stronger.” Further, he found that “Google understands there is no genuine competition for the defaults because it knows that its partners cannot afford to go elsewhere,” disagreeing with Google’s arguments that the default deals were not exclusive.
“The key question then is this: Do Google’s exclusive distribution contracts reasonably appear capable of significantly contributing to maintaining Google’s monopoly power in the general search services market?” Mehta wrote. “The answer is ‘yes.'”
The US Department of Justice sued TikTok today, accusing the short-video platform of illegally collecting data on millions of kids and demanding a permanent injunction “to put an end to TikTok’s unlawful massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy.”
The DOJ said that TikTok had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule), claiming that TikTok allowed kids “to create and access accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent,” collected “data from those children,” and failed to “comply with parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts and information.”
The COPPA Rule requires TikTok to prove that it does not target kids as its primary audience, the DOJ said, and TikTok claims to satisfy that “by requiring users creating accounts to report their birthdates.”
However, even if a child inputs their real birthdate, the DOJ said, TikTok does nothing to stop them from restarting the process and using a fake birthdate. Dodging TikTok’s age gate has been easy for millions of kids, the DOJ alleged, and TikTok knows that, collecting their information anyway and neglecting to delete information even when child users “identify themselves as children.”
“The precise magnitude” of TikTok’s violations “is difficult to determine,” the DOJ’s complaint said. But TikTok’s “internal analyses show that millions of TikTok’s US users are children under the age of 13.”
“For example, the number of US TikTok users that Defendants classified as age 14 or younger in 2020 was millions higher than the US Census Bureau’s estimate of the total number of 13- and 14-year-olds in the United States, suggesting that many of those users were children younger than 13,” the DOJ said.
TikTok seemingly risks huge fines if the DOJ proves its case. The DOJ has asked a jury to agree that damages are owed for each “collection, use, or disclosure of a child’s personal information” that violates the COPPA Rule, with likely multiple violations spanning millions of children’s accounts. And any recent violations could cost more, as the DOJ noted that the FTC Act authorizes civil penalties up to $51,744 “for each violation of the Rule assessed after January 10, 2024.”
A TikTok spokesperson told Ars that TikTok plans to fight the lawsuit, which is part of the US’s ongoing battle with the app. Currently, TikTok is fighting a nationwide ban that was passed this year, due to growing political tensions with its China-based owner and lawmakers’ concerns over TikTok’s data collection and alleged repeated spying on Americans.
“We disagree with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed,” TikTok’s spokesperson told Ars. “We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform. To that end, we offer age-appropriate experiences with stringent safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users, and have voluntarily launched features such as default screentime limits, Family Pairing, and additional privacy protections for minors.”
The DOJ seems to think damages are owed for past as well as possibly current violations. It claimed that TikTok already has more sophisticated ways to identify the ages of child users for ad-targeting but doesn’t use the same technology to block underage sign-ups because TikTok is allegedly unwilling to dedicate resources to widely police kids on its platform.
“By adhering to these deficient policies, Defendants actively avoid deleting the accounts of users they know to be children,” the DOJ alleged, claiming that “internal communications reveal that Defendants’ employees were aware of this issue.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined progressive groups—including Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and the Tech Oversight Project—pressuring the US Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market due to alleged antitrust concerns, Reuters reported.
In a letter to the DOJ’s chief antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, groups demanding more Big Tech oversight raised alarms that Nvidia’s top rivals apparently “are struggling to gain traction” because “Nvidia’s near-absolute dominance of the market is difficult to counter” and “funders are wary of backing its rivals.”
Nvidia is currently “the world’s most valuable public company,” their letter said, worth more than $3 trillion after taking near-total control of the high-performance AI chip market. Particularly “astonishing,” the letter said, was Nvidia’s dominance in the market for GPU accelerator chips, which are at the heart of today’s leading AI. Groups urged Kanter to probe Nvidia’s business practices to ensure that rivals aren’t permanently blocked from competing.
According to the advocacy groups that strongly oppose Big Tech monopolies, Nvidia “now holds an 80 percent overall global market share in GPU chips and a 98 percent share in the data center market.” This “puts it in a position to crowd out competitors and set global pricing and the terms of trade,” the letter warned.
Earlier this year, inside sources reported that the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission reached a deal where the DOJ would probe Nvidia’s alleged anti-competitive behavior in the booming AI industry, and the FTC would probe OpenAI and Microsoft. But there has been no official Nvidia probe announced, prompting progressive groups to push harder for the DOJ to recognize what they view as a “dire danger to the open market” that “well deserves DOJ scrutiny.”
Ultimately, the advocacy groups told Kanter that they fear Nvidia wielding “control over the world’s computing destiny,” noting that Nvidia’s cloud computing data centers don’t just power “Big Tech’s consumer products” but also “underpin every aspect of contemporary society, including the financial system, logistics, healthcare, and defense.”
They claimed that Nvidia is “leveraging” its “scarce chips” to force customers to buy its “chips, networking, and programming software as a package.” Such bundling and “price-fixing,” their letter warned, appear to be “the same kinds of anti-competitive tactics that the courts, in response to actions brought by the Department of Justice against other companies, have found to be illegal” and could perhaps “stifle innovation.”
Although data from TechInsights suggested that Nvidia’s chip shortage and cost actually helped companies like AMD and Intel sell chips in 2023, both Nvidia rivals reported losses in market share earlier this year, Yahoo Finance reported.
Since then, the European Union and the United Kingdom, as well as the US, have heightened scrutiny, but their seeming lag to follow through with an official investigation may only embolden Nvidia, as the company allegedly “believes its market behavior is above the law,” the progressive groups wrote. Suspicious behavior includes allegations that “Nvidia has continued to sell chips to Chinese customers and provide them computing access” despite a “Department of Commerce ban on trading with Chinese companies due to national security and human rights concerns.”
“Its chips have been confirmed to be reaching blacklisted Chinese entities,” their letter warned, citing a Wall Street Journal report.
Nvidia’s dominance apparently impacts everyone involved with AI. According to the letter, Nvidia seemingly “determining who receives inventory from a limited supply, setting premium pricing, and contractually blocking customers from doing business with competitors” is “alarming” the entire AI industry. That includes “both small companies (who find their supply choked off) and the Big Tech AI giants.”
Kanter will likely be receptive to the letter. In June, Fast Company reported that Kanter told an audience at an AI conference that there are “structures and trends in AI that should give us pause.” He further suggested that any technology that “relies on massive amounts of data and computing power” can “give already dominant firms a substantial advantage,” according to Fast Company’s summary of his remarks.
