In December, Google spent $700 million to resolve claims by states that its Play Store strong-armed app makers into high fees and tough terms. About six weeks after that, Google paid $350 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of improperly sharing users’ private information.
On Monday morning, a Massachusetts company called Singular Computing said it is resolved its lawsuit against Google, involving claims that the tech giant stole its chip designs. Singular said in a news release that it has “entered into a patent settlement and license agreement with Google.”
Google is also on the brink of a fourth legal settlement in three months to end 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 clear the decks for court battles that could prove more damaging to the company and could reshape the entire internet industry: two federal suits brought by the Department of Justice, targeting Google’s search engine and its advertising business.
The Justice Department accused Google of rigging the search market through preferential deals with phone makers like Apple and Samsung. The company will return to court in May for closing arguments in what is likely to be the biggest legal trial for a tech company since US v. Microsoft more than two decades ago.
In other federal lawsuits, expected to go to trial in September, the Justice Department said Google “undermined legitimate competition in the ad tech industry” by controlling a wide range of tools that advertisers and publishers rely on. to buy and sell ads. Google has denied wrongdoing in both cases, saying its search engine promotes online competition and its ad technology provides a financial lifeline to publishers and other online businesses.
Google said in a statement that it is not clearing the decks for future litigation and won dozens of cases in US courts last year.
“When it makes sense, we settle cases to avoid lengthy, uncertain and costly litigation,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesman. “And when we have to defend ourselves and the industry, we do.”
The Justice Department could ask the court to ban Google’s preferential deals with browser makers, and it could argue that distribution platforms for its search engine, such as the Chrome browser or the Android operating system, should remove from the company.
The department has argued that Google should be forced to spin off its advertising technology unit, to loosen the ad industry’s dependence on the company. Any divestiture would be a costly and time-consuming process, reducing the company’s revenue and influence.
Much of the recent settlement also followed the company’s stunning defeat of Epic Games, the maker of the hit game Fortnite, in a high-profile trial in December. Epic said Google undermined competition for app makers through high fees and strict rules, and a San Francisco jury agreed. Google has begun its appeal of the verdict, but a federal judge may order the company to accept more payment methods and app stores on the Android mobile operating system.
Douglas Melamed, a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School, said that “at this time of pretty dramatic regulatory change and legal risk for all these big technology platforms,” Google may be thinking it’s time to settle. the smaller cases “just so we ‘ don’t hang it on us.”
Google’s patent case in Singular revolves around some of the company’s most important chips — used to run artificial intelligence — called Tensor Processing Units. Singular said its founder, Joseph Bates, met with Google from 2010 to 2014 and discussed his chip designs. A few years later, Google’s TPUs infringed on two of Dr.’s patents. Bates, Singular argued when it filed suit in late 2019.
Singular cited an email from Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, in which he wrote that Singular’s designs “fit really well” with Google’s chip initiatives. The parties agreed to settle the case in January.
Singular is seeking $1.67 billion in damages. The companies declined to comment on the financial terms of their arrangement. In its statement, Singular said Google had agreed to a patent license. The tech giant did not admit that it was at fault.
“As we showed in court, Singular’s patent does not apply to our Tensor Processing Units, which have been independently designed and developed by Google engineers using Google technology for many years,” said Mr. Castañeda, the Google spokesperson.
said Dr. Bates, founder of Singular, whose company’s goal is to provide universities with supercomputers, which he hopes “can help limit the concentration of power that AI gives to large technology companies.”
In a $700 million settlement with attorneys general for all 50 states, Google agreed to allow app makers to offer their own billing systems and app stores on Android devices. But more importantly, Google can continue charging fees to big companies regardless of whether consumers pay, even as app makers get a discount for processing their own transactions. If the states’ claims are not settled, they are heard during the Epic trial.
In December, Google said it would settle a class-action case that alleged its private browsing tab settings in Chrome, called incognito mode, weren’t private enough. The suit said Google misled users by constantly monitoring their online activity in incognito mode.
The case has already created negative headlines for Google, including the revelation that its chief marketing officer, Lorraine Twohill, wrote to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, complaining that the incognito mode was it’s hard to market because it’s “not really private, so it requires really vague, hedging language that’s almost more harmful.”
A California federal judge has ordered Google to pay penalties for missing discovery deadlines, so it covers some of the legal fees for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, led by high-profile lawyers which is David Boies. Google said in a statement that it was “cooperating with the complete discovery.” A trial is scheduled to begin in early February, and would bring more revelations about Google through evidence and testimony. The company said in December that it would settle the case, and an official settlement is expected this month.
“We settled because we really 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 its defunct social media site, Google+. The service inadvertently gave developers access to users’ information from 2015 to 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018, and accused Google of hiding the issue from users and regulators even though it had fixed the problem.
The company settled with Google+ users for $7.5 million in 2020, but the shareholder lawsuit continued. Google has tried several times to have the case thrown out, including in 2022 when it unsuccessfully asked the Supreme Court to intervene. In the end, the only way to lose the case is to make a deal.
It’s possible in some of these cases that Google would have to pay more money in damages than it could have agreed to if they had stayed in court, Mr. Melamed and other legal experts.
“The problem with litigation is that every time you go to court, there’s an 80 percent chance that anything can happen, including that you can be arrested,” said Mr. Melamed, recounting the words of a friend. “It’s just so unpredictable.”
