Judge Mehta: Cowardly or Just Lazy? ⭐

John F. Kennedy once said of U.S. plans to travel to the moon that we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard. But U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta has taken the opposite approach in U.S. v. Google.

Faced with a stockpile of evidence detailing several years of abuses by a convicted monopolist, he waffled for over a year before finally deciding to do absolutely nothing to halt any of its illegal behaviors. In choosing the easy way out, he hasn’t just undermined America’s antitrust authority, he’s become complicit in Google’s law breaking and violated the oaths he took when sworn in.

Given this, the U.S. Department of Justice shouldn’t just appeal this ridiculous decision. It should also seek to have Judge Mehta replaced by a more competent jurist and work to ensure that more of the penalties it recommended are enacted to prevent further abuses.
The ruling
I once observed of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that if one were to take the script from any of his speeches and ask Word to summarize it, the result would simply state, “This page intentionally left blank.” My point was that Nadella says little or nothing using as many words as possible. And I am having this experience again reading Judge Mehta’s remedy ruling. It’s 230 pages of absolute nonsense masquerading as a decision. In fact, it should be referred to as the judge’s indecision.

That this arrived after Mehta aggressively tore into Google in his initial ruling against the abusive monopolist makes this retreat all the more bizarre. The evidence is there, as is the truth. And Mehta, talking big during the trial, his initial ruling, and in later remedy hearings has revealed himself to be nothing more than a scared dog, all bark and no bite. Or maybe it’s just laziness. Overseeing a breakup of Google was apparently more time consuming than he could be bothered with.

This, to me, is the key failure of the (in)decision.

In his ruling against Google last year, Judge Mehta wrote that “Google has thwarted true competition by foreclosing its rivals from the most effective channels of search distribution. Google’s distribution agreements are exclusionary contracts that violate Section 2 [of the Sherman Act] because they ensure that half of all [online search] users in the United States will receive Google as the preloaded default on all Apple and Android devices, as well as cause additional anticompetitive harm. The agreements ‘clearly have a significant effect in preserving [Google’s] monopoly’.”

Given this, it was clear that Mehta would remove those channels of search distribution.

But he did not. Google Search can remain the preloaded default on all Apple and Android devices, which will continue to have a significant effect in preserving a monopoly that this same judge ruled was illegal.

The DOJ’s recommendation that Google be forced to divest itself of Chrome—and, should the abuses continue, of Android as well—may seem radical in some...