Adi Robertson

Google says it’s more likely than you think! The company is still fighting with the DOJ over whether to admit a potentially “embarrassing” document into evidence — the one that led to public records of the trial getting pulled off the internet. Mehta says he’ll rule on admitting the document tomorrow.

And that’s right, it sounds like we also still don’t know if the Justice Department will be allowed to resume posting exhibits online. But we got some testimony from DuckDuckGo’s CEO on the company’s travails competing with Google.

It’s the end of a locked-down day in US v. Google, culminating in some discussion of a yet-unviewed document at the center of a dispute between the two parties. And apparently we still don’t know if the Justice Department will be allowed to post exhibits from the trial (which, let’s reiterate, are public records) online. Frustrating!

Courtesy of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where law goes to die. The rule (requiring age verifications and health warnings on sites with a high percentage of adult content) was blocked in August through a lower court decision that’s now been overturned — without any explanation from the appeals court, which I guess we should expect by now.

Per Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen, there’s been “no word” on whether the Justice Department can keep posting exhibits online as they’re introduced in court.

Here’s the list of expected witnesses for the day as week two for this trial between the DOJ and Google kicks off, starting at 9:30AM ET:

• Verizon executive Brian Higgins, who will likely be questioned about Google’s exclusivity deals on Android. (This may take place in a closed court session.)

• Google vice president and general manager of ads Jerry Dischler. Dischler has worked at Google since 2005, so there’s a lot of history to go over.

• Former Google financial analyst John Yoo. Yoo’s LinkedIn bio describes his work as “research and analytics to structure and scale some of Google’s largest commercial deals meant to drive distribution and usage of Google’s services” on Android, among other tasks. He joined the company in 2016 and left in March of 2023.