Google settles smaller lawsuits as it prepares for more antitrust battles

In December, Google spent $700 million to resolve states’ claims that the Play Store had strong-armed app makers into paying high fees and harsh terms. About six weeks after that, Google paid $350 million to settle a lawsuit accusing Google of unlawfully sharing users’ private data.

A Massachusetts company, Singular Computing, said this on Monday morning it was resolved the lawsuit with Google, which alleged that the tech giant stole its chip designs. Singular said in a press release that it had “entered into a settlement and patent licensing agreement with Google.”

Google is also on the verge of a fourth legal settlement in three months to resolve claims that it misrepresented the privacy settings of its Chrome web browser.

In just a few months, Google has spent more than $1 billion to pave the way for lawsuits that could be far more damaging to the company and could reshape the entire Internet industry: two federal lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice against Google’s search engine and its advertising activities.

The Justice Department accused Google of manipulating the search market through preferential deals with phone makers such as Apple and Samsung. The company will appear in court in May for closing arguments in what will likely be the biggest legal test for a technology company since US vs. Microsoft more than two decades ago.

In the other federal lawsuit, expected to go to trial in September, the Justice Department said Google “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry” by taking control of the wide range of tools used by advertisers and publishers were dependent on to buy and sell. ads. Google has denied wrongdoing in both cases, saying its search engine promotes online competition and that its ad technology has given publishers and other online companies a financial lifeline.

Google said in a statement that it is not paving the way for future lawsuits and has won dozens of cases in U.S. courts over the past year.

“When it makes sense, we settle cases to avoid lengthy, uncertain and costly litigation,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson. “And if we need to defend ourselves and the industry, we will.”

The Justice Department could ask the court to ban Google’s preference agreements with browser makers, and could argue that distribution platforms for the search engine, such as the Chrome browser or Android operating system, should be spun off from the company.

The department has already argued that Google should be forced to spin off its ad tech unit to reduce the ad industry’s dependence on the company. Any divestiture would be a costly and time-consuming process, affecting the company’s revenues and influence.

The most recent settlements also followed the company’s stunning loss to Epic Games, the maker of the popular game Fortnite, in a high-profile lawsuit in December. Epic had argued that Google undermined competition for app makers through high fees and strict regulations, and a San Francisco jury agreed. Google has appealed the verdict, but a federal judge could order the company to accept more payment methods and app stores on the Android mobile operating system.

Douglas Melamed, a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School, said that “in this day and age of pretty dramatic changes in the regulatory and legal risks for all these big tech platforms,” Google may think it’s time to resolve smaller issues, “so we don’t do that.” It’s not hanging over our heads.’

Google’s patent case with Singular centered on some of the company’s key chips – used to power artificial intelligence – called Tensor Processing Units. Singular had said that its founder, Joseph Bates, met with Google from 2010 to 2014 and discussed its chip designs. Years later, Google’s TPUs infringed on two of Dr.’s patents. Bates, Single argument when it filed suit in late 2019.

Singular cited an email from Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean, in which he wrote that Singular’s designs were “well suited” to Google’s chip initiatives. The parties agreed to settle the case in January.

Singular had demanded $1.67 billion in damages. The companies declined to comment on the financial terms of their settlement. In its statement, Singular said Google agreed to a patent license. The tech giant did not admit guilt.

“As we showed in court, Singular’s patent does not apply to our Tensor Processing Units, which were independently designed and built by Google engineers over many years using Google technology,” said Mr. Castañeda, the spokesperson from Google.

Dr. Bates, the founder of Singular, said the company’s goal was to give universities supercomputers, which he hopes can “help limit the concentration of AI power on the big tech companies.”

In the $700 million settlement with attorneys general for all fifty states, Google agreed to allow app makers to offer their own billing systems and app stores on Android devices. But crucially, Google can continue to charge big companies regardless of how consumers pay, even as app makers get a cut for processing their own transactions. If the states’ claims had not been settled, they would have been heard at Epic’s lawsuit.

In December, Google said it would settle a class action lawsuit alleging that Chrome’s private browsing tab settings, known as incognito mode, were not very private. The lawsuit alleged that Google misled users by continuing to track their online activities in incognito mode.

The case had already generated negative headlines for Google, including the revelation that its chief marketing officer, Lorraine Twohill, had written to Google CEO Sundar Pichai complaining that Incognito mode was difficult to market because it “doesn’t really was private, so there was really vague, hedging language that was almost more damaging.”

A federal judge in California has ordered Google to pay penalties for missing discovery deadlines, forcing Google to foot some of the legal bills for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, led by high-profile attorney David Boies. Google said in a statement that it had “cooperated in exhaustive discovery.” A trial was scheduled to begin in early February and would have led to more revelations about Google through evidence and testimony. The company said in December it would settle the case, and an official settlement is expected this month.

“We settled because we basically got what we could have gotten if we had gone to trial and won,” Mr. Boies said in an interview.

In February, Google said it would pay $350 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit over a privacy breach at defunct social media site Google+. The service had unintentionally given developers access to user information between 2015 and 2018. The Wall Street Journal reports this in 2018, and Google was accused of hiding the problem from users and regulators even after it fixed the problem.

The company had settled with Google+ users for $7.5 million in 2020, but the shareholder lawsuit continued. Google had tried several times to have the case dismissed, including in 2022 when it unsuccessfully asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Ultimately, forging a deal was the only way to make the case go away.

In some of these cases, it is possible that Google would have had to pay more in damages than it settled for if they had stayed in court, Mr. Melamed and other legal experts said.

“The problem with lawsuits is that when you go into court, there is an 80 percent chance that something could happen, including that you could be arrested,” Mr. Melamed said, recounting the words of a friend. “It’s just so unpredictable.”