Google lost its first antitrust case, so what happens next?

On The Vergecast: The DOJ vs Google, Elon Musk’s very latest silly lawsuit, and a TV shootout.

By Alex Cranz, deputy editor and co-host of The Vergecast. She oversaw consumer tech coverage at Gizmodo for five years. Her work has also appeared in the WSJ and Wired.

Aug 9, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge

Google might be having a big Pixel phone event next week, but this week the company had to reckon with a major loss to the Department of Justice, who found the company liable for violating US antitrust law.

Naturally we had to break the entire case down on The Vergecast. So Lauren Feiner, who covered the case, and Alex Heath, who has been reporting on the reactions from the tech world, joined Nilay and myself to cover the best bits of the judge’s decisions and try to figure out what this all means.

Then, keeping with the legal theme, we talked about Elon Musk’s very silly lawsuit against advertisers who *checks notes* don’t want to advertise on X. That’s a thing they’re allowed to do! But it hasn’t stopped Musk from lobbing a lawsuit at the companies.

But really what we really wanted to talk about, and eventually get to in the lightning round, is a very cool shootout of TVs that Nilay got to judge in upstate New York alongside some of the nerdiest and techiest people in TV design and calibration. That’s when we’re not talking about Disney finally making money on streaming (by increasing prices), the end of the Chromecast dongle, the Delta CEO’s inability to check his email, and Humane’s inability to sell its AI Pin.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Google v United States:

And on the latest Elon Musk lawsuit:

And in the lightning round: