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When Google's Fancy Lawyers Screw Up and Jeopardize Sheryl Sandberg, at $1500/Hour
A redacted document showed extremely sensitive information. Google's lawyer accidentally made it public.
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Henry Adams, one of the most important thinkers in the 19th century and an ardent anti-monopolist, believed that corporate secrecy was the enemy of self-rule. "From whatever point of view the trust problem is considered,” he wrote, “publicity stands as the first step in its solution; and there is reason to believe that the further the government is willing to go in its statutory definition of publicity the greater likelihood is there that it may be excused from the necessity of exercising direct administrative control." When Congress originally designed the corporate tax system in 1909, the goal was to make corporate tax returns public. (This actually happened for one year in the 1920s, but was quickly ended.)
Today, big business in America is far too secretive, with an endless thicket of confidentiality rules, trade secrets law, and deferential judges and enforcers who think that revealing public information about big business is some sort of scandal. It’s so bad that when the FDA asked pharmaceutical companies where their manufacturing plants were at the beginning of the pandemic, some firms cited trade secrets rules and refused to divulge the information. This is a consistent problem - we didn’t know why the FTC refused to bring a case against Google in 2012 until a leak this year, and the information would have been incredibly useful had the FTC and Google not engaged in a decade-long cover-up. a posture is ridiculous and obnoxious, so I find it immensely pleasurable when the antitrust fancy world screws up and accidentally reveal information the public should know. And that just happened.
In a response to the complaint of a group of state attorney generals, Google’s lawyers - Paul Yetter at Yetter Coleman - filed a response, but accidentally forgot to redact critical information. So now we know a few important new details about the Texas adtech case. This case includes an allegation that Google’s large online advertising marketplace - think stock market but instead of stocks they trade ad slots - is riddled with secret rigged auctions.
The redacted details show something called “Project Bernanke,” a scheme engineered by Google in which had one arm of its ad business front-running trades for ad inventory, awarding itself hundreds of millions of dollars a year by giving itself a better position in the auctions. Project Bernanke (cute name guys!) was kept secret from publishers.
In addition, we now know more details about a deal between Google and Facebook to give Facebook some preferred position in those ad auctions, supposedly in return for Facebook not competing with Google in the online advertising auction space. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “The agreement was signed by, among other individuals, Philipp Schindler, Google’s Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer.”
Zoink. Cartel deals aren’t just illegal, they are criminal. So double zoink.
Here’s Jason Kint on the screw-up.


I’ve asked around, and Yetter is likely to be getting $1500/hour, or more, for his legal advice. There are a couple of things to learn from this mistake. First, judges redact way too many details, often protecting what they perceive as business proprietary information but is in fact simply evidence of cheating. The court system is supposed to be a public accounting. And second, fancy lawyers aren’t Gods, and we should stop acting like that the hundreds of millions (or perhaps one billion plus), that Google spends on legal services, means it can avoid obeying the law. That myth is a way of getting the public to give up before the battle even starts.
I don’t think there should be a problem with leaks, because I don’t think there should be very much information kept secret in the first place. But to be clear, this isn’t the first leak in the case. When the Texas AG sent around his proposed complaint to the other state attorney generals, someone leaked the full complaint to the press. And one of Google’s lawyers - Eric Mahr from Freshfields - was outraged. "It's difficult for us not to believe that had plaintiffs not been for whatever reason rushing to file in December,” he said, “that additional confidentiality measures couldn't have been taken that would have avoided the leak."
Yes, don’t be too hasty, biglaw, you might reveal something truthful.
When Google's Fancy Lawyers Screw Up and Jeopardize Sheryl Sandberg, at $1500/Hour
Yeah, that is super illegal.... On attorneys, an interesting antitrust story would be the American Bar Association (and the American Medical Association for that matter). The ABA forces more education on would be lawyers than any other common law country in the world. Nearly everywhere else in the world, Canada being the exception, law is an undergrad degree. It takes three years and is basically the same curriculum as the JD degree. They also force law school to be really expensive by requiring tenured professors instead of just hiring practicing lawyers to teach the classes, among other requirements... like a law library which isn't super relevant anymore. They won't allow online law schools to become accredited... even though law school is uniquely well suited to an online format. The ABA can recommend whatever the feel like recommending, but the anti trust comes in as they have captured the law examiner boards of all 50 states and have made their recommendations required by law to sit for the state bar exams. Obviously they are not unbiased. The ABA is the lawyers trade organization. Existing lawyers benefit by tapping down competition by making it really difficult and costly to produce new attorneys that will compete with their membership. Think how weird it would be if the cosmetologists trade org suddenly started requiring people to get a BA in whatever, as the ABA does, before they could go to a barber training program and had all 50 states make that the law in order to get a license... The states have a bar exam which is supposed to test all the knowledge one needs to be a competent attorney. How about prepare anyway you want to prepare and anyone can take the test? If they pass, congrats, you're an attorney. If the bar exam doesn't test everything that is required to be a competent attorney, then design a better test. It is not a small thing as it basically jacks up the price for citizens to petition the courts and use the legal system.
Everything is rigged against us. The MSM is rigged. Project Veritas showed us the latest example of that this week.
But before we knew that, we knew that the 2020 Presidential election was rigged with ballot stuffing/fraudulent ballots cast to the tune of >64k, voting machines that were able to wirelessly connect to the internet despite company's protestations. The Michigan legal filings last week made that all public. We can now suspect that many, many elections in other states and at other times have been rigged, both this last year and long before this last year.
China Joe "won" this last election because the MSM covered up the steal. The MSM is the chief sell out in our democracy. It has to be the first target of reform. But how?
And then there is the case of Hunter Biden and the Big Guy, China Joe Briben, who has for decades been collecting a kick back of 10% from the family members who profit from China Joe selling US Foreign Policy in return for high paying "jobs" and inexplicable cash payments or inappropriate contracts all designed to provide plausible deniability about what amounts to bribery.
Hey, but how did China Joe get his name? A: By selling us all out to Communist China. The process of allowing, no, financially rewarding US Companies to offshore jobs to the CCP controlled slave factories is decades old now. TPTB literally gutted the USA and they did it in collusion between the American Chamber of Commerce, the "Libertarian Think Tank Industry" providing ideological cover for cash endowments (Harvard is big in this play), and the CCP. And the theft and gutting of this great nation was a bipartisan effort as both parties played good cop/bad cop on irrelevancies even as the factory equipment sailed East without a mention. Their agreements of betrayal are very likely in print is some dusty safe in Beijing but we live this reality when we find our kids cannot get a decent job.
Finally, we know that the investment field is rigged against the individual investor.
GME/GameStop short and short squeeze (and from Jim Cramer in his 2006 interview) that the stock market is rigged with large investment houses able to destroy the value of a company through a collusion between their investment fund and the fake news media. Today you have these companies picking targets to drive down stock prices with Media in the wings ready to announce fake news stories to grease the shorts. They tried the with the Taiwanese semiconductor company, AMD, that was challenging Intel. They lost that one...or did they? And then you have companies like BMY or SCYX that are routinely pummeled to near oblivion in order to transfer money from the small investors to the large. What does the FTC do about that? Nuttin'.
Sodom and Gomorrah fell when the rot and corruption was so great that only obliteration could solve it. Are we there, yet? Seems like we are close.