September, 01 2023, 02:45pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Robyn Shapiro,,rshapiro@economicliberties.us
The Public Needs Transparency in US v. Google Trial
The American Economic Liberties Project, along with partners Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and Revolving Door Project, filed a motion yesterday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in the case of U.S. v. Google, LLC, urging the Court to permit a publicly available audio feed of the unsealed portions of the upcoming antitrust trial on Google search.
“The Google search trial will be hugely consequential for our digital world where the outcome will determine how millions of Americans access and use the internet.” said Katherine Van Dyck, Senior Counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. “Our motion to intervene is not about the convenience of a live audio feed; it is about preserving the public’s constitutional right to transparency in our judicial system. While ordinary Americans can get their whole lives exposed in court, a trillion dollar company is opposed to an accessible public trial and attempting to shroud their own proceedings in secrecy. The American public has a significant stake in the outcome of this trial, and as such, we hope the court accepts our intervention to provide much needed transparency.”
“Google’s influence on our economy and our daily digital activities is enormous. That pervasive monopoly power is now on trial, with the outcome expected to shape how millions of Americans use the internet,” said Maria Langholz, Communications Director for Demand Progress. “At the very least, the public has a right to know what goes on in this trial. We urge the court to recognize these stakes and grant live audio access to the trial proceedings.”
“Google routinely uses its monopoly power over Search and other platforms to manipulate and exploit almost every American,” said Barry Lynn, Open Markets Institute Executive Director. “The corporation poses many direct threats to our democracy and our most fundamental liberties. It is the public’s right – and a public imperative — to have live audio access to a trial that will help determine the future of Google’s role in our society.”
“This is a monumental case against a corporation that stands accused of exploiting Americans using monopoly power,” said Andrea Beaty, Research Director of the Revolving Door Project. “Those Americans deserve to be able to follow the proceedings as they happen. Opening the proceedings is clearly in the public interest, while only Google benefits from closed doors.”
The concentration of corporate power broadly affects the general public, leading to increased prices, lower quality products and services, underinvestment and stymied innovation, and harm to workers. As the motion explains, access to the courtroom should not be restricted to special interest groups in Washington, D.C. The American public has a right of access to proceedings like the trial that will play out before the Court in D.C., deciding the legality of Google’s undisputed monopoly over a number of internet search-related markets that they access every day.
Read the full motion here.
Learn more about Economic Liberties here.
The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America's system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.
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Senate Hearing Exposes Big Oil's 'Campaign of Deception and Distraction'
"Company officials will admit the terrifying reality of their business model behind closed doors but say something entirely different, false, and soothing to the public," Rep. Jamie Raskin said.
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The U.S. Senate Budget Committee held a hearing Wednesday morning on the ongoing efforts of major fossil fuel companies and trade groups to delay climate action while deceptively painting themselves as part of the solution.
The hearing was based on an investigation launched by the House Oversight Committee in 2021 into the activities and communications of Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Chamber of Commerce. Both committees released the resulting report, Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil's Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change, on Tuesday.
"Our investigation uncovered compelling evidence of aggressive industry deceit which continues to this day," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, said in his Senate testimony Wednesday. "The joint report and documents we discovered show how, time and again, the biggest oil and gas corporations say one thing for the purposes of public consumption but do something completely different to protect their profits. Company officials will admit the terrifying reality of their business model behind closed doors but say something entirely different, false, and soothing to the public."
"Policymakers and prosecutors must act swiftly to hold this rogue industry accountable for the climate chaos it has knowingly caused and bring its days of drill, deny, and delay to an end."
Raskin detailed key findings of the House investigation. The companies and trade groups:
- Made public pledges to abide by the Paris agreement that they internally acknowledged were impossible;
- Shifted from denying climate science to boosting natural gas and lying about being part of the solution;
- Publicized investments in low-carbon technologies that they internally admitted were unlikely to work;
- Depended on trade associations to promote their climate deceptions and lobby against effective climate action; and
- Used partnerships with academic institutes to greenwash their image while also influencing research and gaining access to politicians.
"Big Oil's corruption is even more far-reaching than we feared," Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, told Common Dreams in response to the hearing. "This investigation exposes how these companies have not only lied to the public for decades, but infiltrated the halls of academia to peddle their climate disinformation."
Raskin gave several notable examples of corporate malfeasance from the House investigation. For example, while BP promotes its commitment to the Paris agreement on its website, it admitted in an email that "no one is committed to anything, other than to stay in the game." He also noted that ExxonMobil spent almost 50% of the amount it used for researching and developing algae as a biofuel between 2009 and 2023 on advertising its efforts.
Further, the companies did not cooperate with the investigation: They had to be subpoenaed to provide meaningful information, and they buried substantial documents in a "paper blizzard" of useless files like mass emails.
"If the companies had fully complied in good faith, who knows what else we might have uncovered?" Raskin asked.
In addition to Raskin, the Senate committee also heard testimony from Sharon Eubanks, the former director of the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Tobacco Litigation Team; Geoffrey Supran, an associate professor of environmental science and policy and the director of the University of Miami's Climate Accountability Lab; Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and managing director of the Energy, Growth, and Security Program at the International Tax Investment Center; and Michael Ratner, a specialist in energy policy at the Congressional Research Service.
"As a scholar of disinformation, I do not use the word 'lie' lightly," Supran said during his testimony. "But no other word adequately describes the oil industry's brazen efforts to mislead the public about its history of misleading the public."
Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media said the hearing was a "huge deal, not just because of what it's revealing about Big Oil's history of climate deception, but because it's laying the groundwork for Congress to finally hold the industry accountable and make polluters pay."
Both speakers at the hearing and senators outlined various ways the industry might be held accountable. Raskin highlighted the similarities between Big Oil's lies about its products' impact on climate and the tobacco industry's lies about its products' impact on human health.
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The possibility that the DOJ could bring a similar case against oil companies was reinforced by Eubanks, who told the Senate: "There exists solid evidentiary basis to move forward with a request to the Department of Justice to investigate the actions of the fossil fuel industry. Just as the Department of Justice investigated the tobacco industry and ultimately filed a civil racketeering complaint against the industry, given the similarities of the fraudulent acts, and the government's successful case against tobacco, there is adequate foundation for building a case."
In response, Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said, "It is time for the Department of Justice to step in and defeat Big Oil's efforts to withhold the truth from the American people."
Another avenue for accountability was laid out by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who spoke up in favor of his Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act, which would use science attributing carbon dioxide and methane emissions to specific companies to then charge those companies for their climate pollution, putting the funds to work for a just transition to renewable energy.
"The idea is simple: The companies who pollute the most, should pay the most," Van Hollen said.
Climate and good governance groups supported the move toward accountability.
"Policymakers and prosecutors must act swiftly to hold this rogue industry accountable for the climate chaos it has knowingly caused and bring its days of drill, deny, and delay to an end," DiPaola told Common Dreams.
David Arkush, director of Public Citizen's Climate Program, said of fossil fuel deception, "It's criminal conduct, and our leaders and legal system should treat it as such."
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) pointed out that it is now possible to attribute rising temperatures, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and more frequent and extreme wildfires to the extraction and burning of oil, gas, and coal.
"This joint congressional investigation is an important step toward ending the fossil fuel industry's lies and obstruction of critical climate action," Kathy Mulvey, the accountability campaign director in UCS' Climate and Energy Program, said. "The internal industry documents released to the public and the testimony at this hearing add to the already considerable mountain of evidence illustrating misconduct by fossil fuel corporations and their surrogates. We urge policymakers and public prosecutors to move expeditiously to pursue accountability through every means at their disposal."
"We're getting to the point where it may be politically possible to actually take on the bad guys."
Reflecting on the hearing on his Substack, Bill McKibbenpointed to another important development it represented: a shift in the attitude of senior Democrats toward fossil gas, which both Raskin and Senate Budget Committee Chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) noted was not as clean as the industry pretended. In the past, Democratic leaders including former President Barack Obama had promoted the idea that gas could be a bridge fuel because it emits less carbon dioxide than coal when burned. But new evidence revealing how much methane its production leaks belies this claim.
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While the Biden administration has so far focused on promoting renewable energy rather than reducing fossil fuel production, with measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the hearing showed that "we're getting to the point where it may be politically possible to actually take on the bad guys," McKibben said.
Indeed, Raskin did not mince works as he concluded his testimony. He referenced Jared Diamond's book Collapse and its assertion that one contribution to a civilization's demise is "the capture of political and social power by a narrow subset of society, which is committed to its own profit and power rather than the common good of the whole society and therefore refuses to take the steps necessary for collective survival."
"Big Oil's campaign of deception and distraction undermines the efforts we need to mobilize our people and government to save our climate, our habitat, and our species," Raskin said. "Unless the deception ends, and until the industry is held accountable, we are unlikely ever to be able to muster the national political will to effectively tackle climate change."
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