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Months out of law school, Yosef Weitzman already has a huge courtroom role in the biggest antitrust trial of the century. In a US federal trial that started last week, Google is accused of unlawfully monopolizing online search and search ads. The company’s self-defined mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, yet Google successfully opposed live streaming the trial and keeping the proceedings wholly open to the public. Enter Weitzman.
The fresh law graduate is among a handful of legal or antitrust geeks trying to attend most, if not all, of the public portions of the trial, fearing a historic moment of tech giant accountability will escape public notice. Some have pushed off day jobs or moved near to the Washington, DC, courthouse. All are obsessively documenting their observations through social media and daily email newsletters.
The trial is scheduled to run near-daily through November and few news outlets can dedicate a reporter to a courtroom seat for eight hours a day for the duration. Most reporters focused on Google are based in San Francisco. Legal and regulatory publications that can commit charge hundreds of dollars for content subscriptions. Any antitrust junkie—or frustrated Google Search user—wanting an affordable readout from the sparsely attended, era-defining trial, must rely on Weitzman, or a handful of others firing off tweets, skeets, and Substacks. “Regardless of your view on this trial and Big Tech, it will affect everyone, so it’s important that the public is aware of what’s going on as the trial unfolds and to record what happens,” Weitzman says.
Megan Gray, an attorney who has sparred with Google in various legal proceedings over two decades but isn’t involved in this case, has felt compelled to take the 30-minute train ride to the courthouse to capture nuances that don’t come through in summaries or transcripts. She has attended all but one day of the trial so far, pushing her legal work into the evenings. “We’ll see if I can go the whole 10 weeks,” she says.
Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and a former tech antitrust policy adviser to president Biden, stopped by the first day of the trial but like other interested scholars is otherwise stuck at his distant day job. “It seems obvious that the trial should be easier for the public to follow,” Wu says. “Unlike, say, the trial of a celebrity, there's no serious danger of something like this becoming a circus.”
Weitzman got his gig after Matthew Stoller, a noted critic of Google's power, decided to hire someone to attend every day of the trial and write about it for his email newsletter Big, which focuses on monopoly issues in tech and beyond and has about 100,000 subscribers. “You can’t cover anti-monopoly politics without recognizing how important this case is,” Stoller says.
A rare combination of experience as a sports section editor of his school paper at the University of Pennsylvania and a fascination with antitrust law helped Weitzman secure the gig. He packed up in Philadelphia and has signed a monthlong sublet within walking distance of the court, but has not figured out where exactly he’ll live for the remainder of the trial. Some new law graduates travel the world in the few months before starting their first job. Weitzman is making a muggy commute to an uncomfortable bench in the courtroom’s public gallery, working up to dozen hours a day. “I’m not complaining at all,” he says.
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Weitzman’s write-up is summarized in Big occasionally and sent out in full each day in a temporary offshoot newsletter on Substack, Big Tech on Trial, which had about 2,700 subscribers after the trial’s first week. He is being paid by Stoller and the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonpartisan anti-monopoly advocacy group where Stoller is director of research.
The last major Big Tech antitrust trial, against Microsoft beginning in 1998, helped open the door to Google amassing the power it now holds over online search and ads. In the current trial, Google’s attorneys argue that the company became the dominant search engine because consumers prefer it—not because they are forced to use it by deals in which Google pays to be the default on phones and browsers, as the US Department of Justice alleges. Attorneys general for every state except Alabama are also involved in bringing the case.
Prosecutors and Google chose to forego a jury, so judge Amit Mehta will decide who wins. He denied a request from groups that included Stoller’s American Economic Liberties Project to allow remote public access for the trial after weighing prosecutors’ support for streaming and Google’s opposition. Mehta cited his own “serious concerns” about unauthorized recording of witness testimony. He also worried about accidental leaks from portions of the trial that will be closed to the public to protect the trade secrets of Google and witnesses.
Stoller calls Mehta’s decision elitist. “This judge was persuaded that the risk that Google would have information it doesn’t want made public get out was too high, and so he only allows people who can take two months off and spend that time in DC to actually hear the case,” Stoller says. He argues that closing the courtroom for some testimony to protect Google’s secrets prevents the public from understanding fundamental details in the case.
The Judicial Conference, which oversees federal district court operating rules, just issued a policy permitting “public live audio” of court proceedings, but it doesn’t cover trials. The conference says it’s still studying whether it can extend access without raising the risk of witnesses becoming intimidated or altering their testimony because of the remote audience. Media and civil rights organizations say widespread streaming of cases during the pandemic, including witness testimony and antitrust trials, did not cause problems.
With the Google case limited to in-person viewing, Weitzman mostly watches from Mehta’s courtroom, where use of phones and computers is barred. For variety he can sit and work in a media room at the courthouse where journalists can watch a closed-circuit broadcast. A separate overflow room for non-media doesn’t allow use of laptops or other personal devices but offers perks over the courtroom including cushioned seats, ample space, and better air conditioning.
Weitzman’s daily dispatches recite and explain the significance of each day’s exchanges between attorneys and witnesses as well as the judge and the attorneys. Among the most striking revelations so far is that Google secretly maneuvered to try to increase search ad pricing without informing advertisers when sales were on pace to miss Wall Street expectations in 2019. Google declined to comment for this story. “My main goal has been to just be accurate and report on what’s happening inside in the courtroom … in a fair way that doesn’t distort what actually happened in favor of either side,” Weitzman says.
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Weitzman’s reports flag when he couldn’t hear or understand some of the dialog and weave in references to trial exhibits. He’s called out internal Google emails and presentations, some of which the Justice Department was posting on its website until Google told the judge about the links earlier this week. Prosecutors pulled the uploads pending Mehta’s take on the practice.
The debate over the exhibits has featured in posts on X (formerly Twitter) from the courthouse by Gray, the independent lawyer. She also has tracked genders, age, and races of presenting attorneys. Based on her perceptions, the Justice Department has fielded four women and three persons of any gender under 45 years old, while Google’s team has featured none in either category; there have been no racial minorities on either side. “It reinforces how old and entrenched Google is,” Gray says. What she characterizes as the arrogant and obstreperous demeanor of testifying Google employees’ has spurred spirited laughter in the overflow room, she says. “You can’t get that through a 2D transcript,” she says.
Beside Gray, Weitzman and journalists at outlets including MLex and Reuters attending in person have all posted their reflections on X. But as people have decamped from the service during Elon Musk’s ownership, it doesn’t provide the definitive conversation on marquee tech events it once did. A Bloomberg journalist at the trial has been skeeting on Bluesky, and a one at Law360 has shared trial musings on Threads.
The dispersed conversation makes newsletters like Weitzman’s, which also aggregates information from elsewhere, more important. Luther Lowe, senior vice president of public policy at business reviews app Yelp, a long-time Google foe, turned his weekly note on Google antitrust news into a daily operation for the trial. He’s attending when he can, but mostly relying on instant transcripts, which cost $1.20 per page and run over 300 pages per day. “The cost of the transcripts by the end of trial will be in the tens of thousands of dollars,” he says. “I want to know what’s going on in real time.” But taking 10 weeks off to sit on his hands and observe everyday isn’t an option.
Even Google’s search rivals Microsoft and DuckDuckGo, which stand to benefit the most if the government wins, don’t have people watching the trial every day. Nor do advocacy groups such as the Tech Oversight Project or Chamber of Progress.
Closer to the courtroom but also missing are US lawmakers and their aides, who are occupied across the street at the Capitol trying to avert a government funding collapse that could suspend the trial next month. When lawmakers get back to considering how to regulate large tech companies, lessons from the Google trial could prove valuable. Congressman Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican, watched opening arguments from the courtroom to show support for the government’s case. Now, his spokesperson Victoria Marshall says he’s following the action through X—and hoping that future trials have greater access.
